OTRS Change GUI look, language and translate language packages

To continue with the OTRS posts, a basic one should be on how to change the language of the user interface. This is a very simple task to achieve, but it’s still an important one. We’re also going to see how to update the language packages because they tend to be incomplete, so it’s not a bad idea to translate some of the texts that are not yet translated.

GUI language and look

Step 1 – Login: login with your user.

Step 2 – Settings: go to the settings page, by pressing your user name on the upper right corner.

Step 3 – Edit preferences: in the User Profile panel, you’ll see the Language and Skin options.

 

3.1 – Languate Selection: below the Language option, select the language of your preference. For this post I’m going to choose Spanish.

3.2 – Skin Selection: below the Skin option, select the skin you want to use. The differences between Ivory and Default is the color. The Defaut’s skin main color is orange, while the Ivory one is light blue. Besides the Default and Ivory skin options, you get the Slim option for both skins. The difference is that the Slim option makes the navigation bar a little bit smaller.

For this post, I’m going to choose Ivory (Slim). 

Press Update to update the skin. Your GUI should now look different from what it previously looked. This is a screenshot for the Admin tab with the Ivory Slim skin and in spanish language.

 

This is everything for the language and GUI modifications. We’ll now continue with how to translate language packages.

Language package translation

As you can see in the last picture, not all text is in spanish. To correct this, let’s focus the Gestión de agentes panel for translation.

Step 1 – Text to translate: make a mental copy of the text you want to translate. Text can’t be copied in this particular place because everything is a button. In this case, I’m going to translate:

"Create and manage agents." => "Crear y administrar agentes."
"Create and manage groups." => "Crear y administrar grupos."
"Agents <-> Groups" => "Agentes Grupos"
"Link agents to groups." => "Asociar agentes a grupos."
"Create and manage roles." => "Crear y administrar roles."
"Agents <-> Roles" => "Agentes Roles"
"Link agents to roles." => "Asociar agentes a roles."
"Link roles to groups." => "Asociar roles a grupos."

Step 2 – OTRS directory: go to your OTRS installation directory, it’s generally in “C:\otrs”.

Step 3 – Language directory: go to “%YourOTRSInstallation%\OTRS\Kernel\Language”. In this directory you’ll see a bunch of .pm files. Look for the one you picked in the language selection. These files are named after the ISO 639-1 language coding, so check this link for your language’s code. In this post we’re going to look for es.pm file.

Step 4 – Open file: open the .pm file with your favorite text editor. For this post, I’m going to use Sublime Text 3, but feel free to use whatever text editor you want.

Step 5 – Find the text: press Ctrl-F paste the text you want to translate and press enter.

Step 6 – Translate: as you can see in the screenshot below, there’s no text after “=>”. This means there is no translation for this text. To translate this text, type its translation in between the quotes like this:

Repeat this process for every text you want to translate.

Step 7 – Save package: after you’re done, save changes and close the file.

Step 8 – Refresh browser: refresh your browser to see the changes.

As you can see from the picture above, we’ve translated the entire Administrar agentes panel from the Admin tab.

So, this is it for this post. I hope this is of utility for you and your company, specially if your native language is not english. 

See you on the next one, but before I leave, here’s a quote from Geoffrey Willans, an english author and journalist, about languages:

You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.
‒Geoffrey Willans

OTRS ITSM Module Installation

In this post we’re going to install the ITSM module for OTRS. First off, let’s start talking about what ITSM really is and a little bit about ITIL, the reference for ITSM best practices the module is based on.

About ITSM

Nowadays, it’s really hard to imagine a business or organization that doesn’t use any kind of information technology for it’s daily operations. This means IT has become one of the major means for completing activities and processes within organizations. This allows companies to optimize processes since computers are much more efficient than humans for certain tasks. Please note that this doesn’t mean that people is no longer necessary and that they should be fired. On the contrary, this grants great opportunities for the organization since the human effort replaced by computers, can now be used to make other tasks that could add greater value to the business. The problem is that IT can get hard to manage, specially in big companies and that’s why the ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) discipline emerged.

For a better understanding of the concept, ITSM, according to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is 

The implementation and management of quality IT services that meet the needs of the
business. IT service management is performed by IT service providers through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.

I highlighted those phrases to make special emphasis that:

• IT must be of utility and add value to the business.
• IT service providers can be external (contracted service provider) or internal (IT Department) to the organization. 

Why do I tell this in an OTRS ITSM Module installation post? Because it’s never bad to learn new things and the background of why software like this is made. ITIL is a very vast and interesting reference that everyone that works in the IT business should know of to really understand the value IT can give to the organization and how to effectively deliver that value. Also, because IT guys, no matter what role they play (technician, developer, network specialist, database specialist, and so on), they all must know what are they really doing and why the business needs their work to get done quickly and effectively. And even better so they could also give improvement ideas for the end users or decision-making people that could lead to a more efficient organization, consequently getting better results and making the IT department more valuable to the company.

Enough said about ITSM, let’s start the module for OTRS installation.

Step 1 – Download OTRS: go to this link, look for the Windows Installer and download it. As you can see, there are lots of options here: 

• ITSM Bundle
• General Catalog
• Change Management Module
• Core
• Incident Problem Management Module
• Service Level Management Module
• Import/Export

Some modules are specific for some ITIL processes, while some are packages needed in order to run the other modules. You can install them individually one by one (General Catalog and Core must be installed first and in that order and then the other modules you need), or you can just install the bundle and everything gets installed. For this tutorial we’re going to install the bundle, but the process for individual module installations is the same.

Step 2 – Install the module:

2.1 – Login: login as an Admin user

2.2 – Package Manager: In the Admin, press Package Manager button in the Administration Panel

2.3 – Choosing File: In the Package Manager view, press the Choose File button in the Actions panel to the left of the screen.

This will open a Browse Window. Look for the .opm file you downloaded from the link above and choose it. After that, you will see the name of the file next to the Choose File button. Press the Install Package to start the installation.

2.4 – Installation Summary: After pressing Install Package OTRS is going to analyze the file you chose. After analyzing you’ll see a new panel to the right labeled Installation Information. This panel should look something like this:

Press Continue to start the installation. This will probably take more than five or ten minutes with no progress bar so be patient. After a while it may throw you a 504 Gateway Time-out error. Just reload and wait for the server to give you back a response, it may take a while again, so be patient. Once you see the response the ITSM module is installed.

Repeat steps 2.3 and 2.4 if you’re installing modules individually.

Step 3 – Group assignation: You now got the response, but why is there nothing new? Because you haven’t assigned permissions to the user to see all of the new features.

3.1 – Getting to Agent management: For this you’ll have to grant the user permissions to the groups. I’m going to get into more detail in a next post of what is this group assignation really and how to achieve this correctly. For now, go to the Admin tab. Press the Agents <-> Groups button in the Agent-Management panel. 

You’ll see a view similar to this one:

3.2 – Choosing the admin user: In the Agents panel, press your Admin user. You’ll now be redirected to the following page:

3.3 – Granting permissions: Now, check the upper RW box to grant permissions on everything. The table should then look like this if you haven’t made any configurations to the OTRS installation yet:

3.4 – Refreshing the UI: so you now assigned the permissions, but sill nothing new, right? Logout and then login back again. You should now see that there are more options in the navigation bar on the top of the screen. Something like this;

So, this is it for the ITSM Module installation. This new options all correspond to certain processes defined within the best practices of ITIL so you can either modify OTRS to match your company’s method of managing services or you can start adopting ITIL best practices in your organization in order to make a better use of OTRS and the ITSM module.

I hope this simple tutorial helped you install the ITSM module and that you got interested on investigating more about ITIL. It’s a great plus to you as an IT person, whether you are a developer, an analyst or a consultant.

 

 

OTRS Windows installation

For my first actual post, I’m going to make a tutorial on how to install OTRS in Windows. Linux installation tutorial will most likely come in the future.

About OTRS

OTRS is an Open Source Ticket Request System. This kind of software is great for handling trouble tickets of every kind within or outside an organization. You can see tickets as requests from internal collaborators such as employers of a department asking for air conditioning maintenance to the maintenance department, or a customer that asks for support or making a complain.

What the system allows is to manage all this incoming requests in different categories (queues in OTRS) and it also makes it possible a complete tracking of the tickets. A person can see all the communication necessary for resolving a ticket, it’s state, it’s owner and responsible and every possible information you can imagine. The system also permits for the administrator to create roles and responsibilities to different queues and the hability to assign agents to those roles. This allows administrators to mantain the information secure and visible only to the people that are meant to see that information.

Another feature of OTRS is that it is highly customizable as it is Open Source and configurable as well. There are lots and lots of options varying from telling the system what fields of tickets to show and which ones to hide; to customizing the GUI to create filters for incoming mail from customers to automatically assign to a queue or just delete them if they’re spam.

There is also an option for adding third-party modules, such as ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) module meant to aid in ITSM activities and processes. This module is ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) certified and I’ll talk about it more later in this post.

OTRS Windows Installation with PostgreSQL

Installing OTRS in Windows is actually very simple, as you would expect in a Windows environment. Here’s a step by step guide:

Step 1 – Download OTRS: go to this link, look for the Windows Installer and download it.

Step 2 – Install OTRS: go to the directory where OTRS installer was downloaded and execute it.

2.1 – Choosing installation language: choose the installation language you feel more comfortable with. This language will not be the final installation language. Hit Ok and then press Next.

2.2 – Choosing Perl version: OTRS is written in Perl and you can choose whether using ActiveState Perl or the bundled version of Perl. I tried installing it with ActiveState since the installer said it has a better performance than the bundled one, but I run into some issues which I could not resolve, so for this tutorial i’ll be using the bundled version. This said, hit Next to continue with the installation.

2.3 – Destination Folder: choose the folder where you want to install OTRS and hit Next.

2.4 – Database Selection: this is an important step. For this tutorial we’re going to use an already installed version of PostgreSQL, so I’m going to choose Use an already  installed databse option. If you don’t have PostgreSQL you can install it if you want to, but it’s not necessary. You can choose the Install the bundled MySQL database option with no negative impact with the installation. Going this way is very straightforward and less complicated so choose what suits you best. Hit Next and then Install to continue.

2.5 – Installation: OTRS is now installing and wait a few minutes. After it’s finished hit Launch to continue.

Step 3 – OTRS Initial Configuration: after hitting Launch button a new window will open in your default browser with a look similar to this:

Hit the Next button and continue.

3.1 – Database Selection: in this step you’re going to select the database engine you have installed.

Note: if you chose to install with the bundled MySQL database these steps will be slightly different for you. From Step 3.3 everything should be the same again.

In this case, I’m going to choose PostgreSQL and the option Create a new database for OTRS and then hit Next.

3.2 – Connection Settings: in this step, OTRS is going to ask for your database user credentials and the host of the connection. Make sure you put the credentials of a user with CREATE DATABASE permissions and then hit Check Database Settings.

If the connection was successful you’ll get a new set of fields. These correspond to the database that OTRS will be using, so feel free to change them however you want. For this post’s purpose I’m going to be using otrsTutorial for the database and OTRS_Tut_User for the master user. Make sure you change the password to something you are more likely to remember or take note on the auto-generated password and then hit Next. This step might take a little while since the database will now be created.

After the database was succesfully configured, you’ll get this window:

Hit Next to continue.

3.3 – General settings: in this step you’ll be asked for some information.

SystemID: just change it to whatever you like best, but if you have multiple installations it’s better for them to be different.

System FQDN: put the name the domain name of the system you’re installing OTRS. It is generally filled by default.

AdminEmail: fill it with the administrator email.

Organization: put the name of your organization.

Default language: this will be the default language. This does not change the administrator’s frontend language automatically. We’re going to change that later in this post.

CheckMXRecord: this has to do with mail redirection. Choose No if your DNS server is slow.

Hit Next to continue.

3.4 – Email Settings: this is the last step of the installation. In here you’ll configure the email the system is going to be using. For this tutorial I’m going to use Gmail SMTP and POP hosting. The image will be self explanatory on how the configuration should be.

Outbound and Inbound mail type and host should stay the same as well as the port if you’re using Gmail, so don’t change them unless you’re completely certain of what you’re doing. For the user authentication, make sure you put your entire mail address, even if it ends with @gmail.com. 

If you’re using another mail host, make sure you follow their instructions on how POP and SMTP configuration should be in order to work.

Once you’re done with that, hit the Check mail configuration button to check the configuration is correct. It if is correct you’ll advance the installation automatically.

Step 4 – Admin configuration: you’ll now be prompted with a Finished view. Go the Start page link it shows and login with the root@localhost user and the generated password.

4.1 – Login successful: one you’re logged in. You’ll see this window:

This is the main view of OTRS. Here you can see information about tickets, but we’re get into that later. For now, focus on the red message. To avoid this message, we’re going to make a new user with Admin privileges.

4.2 – Creating new Admin user: press the Admin button in the upper left side of the screen. You’ll get redirected to the Admin panel. In here, press the Agents button as shown below.

You’ll now see this view. Hit the Add agent button:

You’ll now be prompted with a form. It’s a bit long so I won’t post a picture, but the basics are simple. Fill the user with the information you consider necessary, but make sure to fill every field with a *, since they’re a must. In here you can set the language of the user’s GUI. The user can later change this if he desires. There’s a bunch of important information you can put in here so make sure you take your time to analyze all of this fields and see what is relevant to fill for your organization. After you’re done hit Submit. 

4.3 – Group Relations: after the agent is created, you’ll be prompted with this window:

This group relations might look confusing, but we’ll get into more details in another post. To grant all permissions to the new user, check the top RW box. the table should now look like this:

Hit the Submit button to finish. Afer this you’ll be redirected to the agents view and you whould see your new user there.

4.4 – Changing root password: to get to the current user management view, go to the upper right corner and hit the name of the user. In this case it’s Admin OTRS since we’re using the Superuser. 

This will open the following view:

Here you can change the password by putting your Current password and the New password, and then pressing Update.

Also, you can change the language, the skin, office schedule, notifications and some other settings. Make sure to explore this panel to see if there’s something of value for your organization.

Step 5 – Logging out: after changing password, you might want to now login with your new Admin user. To Logout press icon next to Admin OTRS label in the upper right corner.

This will prompt you to the Login page and you can now login with your credentials.

And we’re done! This is everything for OTRS basic installation in Windows using an external database.

My next post is going to be about installing the ITSM module.

Reference for the Gmail configuration:  http://wiki.otterhub.org/index.php?title=Configure_OTRS_with_Gmail